Eating and reading: A report
The eating begins in earnest just before Halloween and continues through December. Meanwhile, the northern hemisphere cools. One becomes sluggish.
I gained five pounds over Thanksgiving. Seven, the last two weeks.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Having fallen behind in my reading, I’m trying to get back on pace by reading these short books:
Shakespeare-wise, I rolled my dice, counted down my table of contents, and landed upon The Winter’s Tale to read next. Doubly appropriate because (a) ’tis (almost) the season and (b) I need something somber after The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado about Nothing.
This is the third straight play in which the fear of being cuckolded fuels the plot. I am beginning to understand, dimly but surely, that this was a big concern in Shakespeare’s time (and in Molière’s, not long after).
Incidentally, here is Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious criticism of Shakespeare (with special mention of Much Ado). It’s forgivable. He wrote this when he was twenty years old; I believe he was a college sophomore.
And here, the polemical philosopher Michael Huemer takes Bankman-Fried’s side. I do like Huemer, but this isn’t his best moment. He puts too much stock in what he thought of the plays when he read them in high school. (Fashioning my objection after Bankman-Fried: What do the priors tell us about one’s highschool or college self arriving at one’s most judicious possible evaluation of Shakespeare?)
Stay gold, Michael Huemer, stay gold.
I gained five pounds over Thanksgiving. Seven, the last two weeks.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Having fallen behind in my reading, I’m trying to get back on pace by reading these short books:
- Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (I read this in high school and again in college)
- John Hersey, Hiroshima (I read this in high school, too)
- C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (I don’t know how many times I’ve read this; I’d forgotten how odd it is when Aslan, Susan, and Lucy frolic with Greek mythic figures – Bacchus, Silenus, and the Maenads – while the chaps are at war)
- Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale
- Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog (my first Maigret novel – only seventy-four to go after this one)
Shakespeare-wise, I rolled my dice, counted down my table of contents, and landed upon The Winter’s Tale to read next. Doubly appropriate because (a) ’tis (almost) the season and (b) I need something somber after The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado about Nothing.
This is the third straight play in which the fear of being cuckolded fuels the plot. I am beginning to understand, dimly but surely, that this was a big concern in Shakespeare’s time (and in Molière’s, not long after).
Incidentally, here is Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious criticism of Shakespeare (with special mention of Much Ado). It’s forgivable. He wrote this when he was twenty years old; I believe he was a college sophomore.
And here, the polemical philosopher Michael Huemer takes Bankman-Fried’s side. I do like Huemer, but this isn’t his best moment. He puts too much stock in what he thought of the plays when he read them in high school. (Fashioning my objection after Bankman-Fried: What do the priors tell us about one’s highschool or college self arriving at one’s most judicious possible evaluation of Shakespeare?)
Stay gold, Michael Huemer, stay gold.